“Mainframe SOA represents a very good strategy for extending and re-using existing business function on this strong platform”, said Dale Vecchio, Research VP at Gartner, Inc. “IMS transactional environments represent some of the largest transactional systems on mainframes and should be leveraged in any SOA strategy.”

SOLA is a comprehensive mainframe Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solution that cost effectively makes mainframe applications part of an SOA. SOLA provides customers with a fast and easy process to expose mainframe applications as secure Web Services, and allows mainframe applications to consume Web Services. Using SOLA, customers can leverage billions of dollars of existing mainframe investments when building an enterprise SOA. The SOLA runtime environment runs entirely on the mainframe, eliminating the need for expensive, unreliable and unnecessary middleware. This coupled with SOLA’s Development Studio vastly increases developer productivity, providing faster time to market and lower application development cost. The combination of a highly optimized runtime, no middleware and improved productivity provide the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in the industry.

SOLA’s high performance and low CPU overhead enable customers to run the world’s largest mainframe SOA implementations in the most cost effective manner. SOLA is the only product proven in enterprise implementations to handle high volume (10 million+) transactions per day in mission-critical mainframe SOA environments.

“This new product makes it easy to re-use IMS applications,” said Paul Gigg, CEO of SOA Software. “Many of our Fortune 1000 customers use IMS and CICS, IMS customers can now enjoy the benefits of including IMS applications in their enterprise SOA.”

“IMS support extends our position as being a complete mainframe SOA solution,” said Jim Crew, SOLA co-creator and Vice President of SOA Software. “SOLA truly delivers mainframe SOA, SOLA was the first to offer production mainframe Web Services, the first to implement WS-Security and WS-Policy, the only product to implement a mainframe UDDI registry, and we’re pleased to extend those capabilities to IMS.”

With this release, the SOLA Developer and the SOLA runtime now support multiple IMS input and output segments, and the IMS transactions being service enabled can be written in COBOL, PL/I or Natural. IMS transactions can also be service consumers by using SOLA’s highly efficient outbound engine.

SOLA IMS is heavily optimized, making it the most efficient option for processing IMS transactions. It offers multiple configurations to provide low cost execution of services built from IMS transactions. Much of SOLA is written in assembler language, so the SOLA runtime offers lower MIPS consumption and higher throughput than alternatives that use Java and rely on zAAP specialty engines.

With SOLA’s support of BPEL, IMS transactions can participate in service orchestration, vastly reducing the latency caused by multiple trips to the mainframe.

Additionally, SOLA offers a Customizable Dictionary to convert Program Variables to Business Terms, enforcing corporate standards. SOLA is a Governed Service Platform, making it fully governable by SOA Software products like Portfolio Manager, Policy Manager, Repository Manager, and Service Manager.

Innovative SOLA features such as One-Click service creation and an easy to use drag-and-drop interface deliver the only secure, standards-based and governable SOA product in the mainframe industry. SOLA provides mainframe end-to-end governance with WS-Security, WS-Policy, mainframe optimized registry, integrated monitoring, logging, auditing and near limitless scalability, all implemented on the mainframe. This makes SOLA the only solution for companies seeking secure, high-volume, mission-critical mainframe SOA. For more information on mainframe SOA for IMS or CICS, please visit http://www.soa.com/mainframe.

About SOA Software
SOA Software is the leading provider of unified governance automation products that enable organizations to successfully plan, build, and run enterprise services. The world’s largest companies including Bank of America, Verizon, and Pfizer use SOA Software solutions to transform their business. For more information, please visit http://www.soa.com.

SOA Software, Policy Manager, Portfolio Manager, Repository Manager, Service Manager, and SOLA are trademarks of SOA Software, Inc. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their registered owners.